Frank Ordonez/The Post-StandardAbbot Sherry Chayat of the Zen Center of Syracuse (left) joins Tom Huff, a Seneca-Cayuga artist, in admiring Huff's new sculpture that celebrates the natural reverence shared by followers of Zen and the Six Nations.

The work of Tom Huff, and other Six Nations artists, is displayed through Sunday as part of an exhibit co-curated by Huff at the Everson Museum of Art.

Sherry Chayat felt no need to see an official proposal. She is abbot of the Zen Center of Syracuse, which borders Onondaga Creek in the city’s Valley neighborhood. Chayat is also a champion of public art, and she envisioned a new creekside sculpture that would symbolize the ties between Zen philosophy and the longhouse beliefs at the Onondaga Nation.

She picked up the phone and called Tom Huff, a Seneca-Cayuga sculptor who lives with his family at Onondaga. Huff, an accomplished artist, is not one for formal applications. He believes strongly that the spirit of a piece waits inside each slab of rock. The message emerges only as he goes along, he said. For that reason, he does no models.

You either trust him to get it right, or you don’t.

Chayat recalls that she mentioned the idea at a casual meeting with civic leaders and business executives. They responded with excitement, quickly piecing together the $10,000 in grants and donations that Huff needed for the project. The result is a 9-foot limestone sculpture, topped by a hawk staring toward the hills of Onondaga. Three sides are completed. One portion remains blank — the area on which the sculpture rested as Huff worked. He intends to finish it soon, maybe even in the snow, with a goal of being done before the summer.

His diligence explains Chayat’s faith. “Once we knew we were going to do it,” she said, “we knew Tom would be the one.”

She is aware of how the city has nearly completed the first major phase of Creekwalk, a walkway that will hug the creek from downtown Syracuse to Onondaga Lake. The civic mission is reaffirming the beauty of a waterway that’s been neglected and cut off from public access for too long.

To Chayat and Huff, that should be only the first step. Eventually, they’d like to see Creekwalk extended through the city and Nedrow, to the Onondaga Nation.

“The creek is a treasure,” said Chayat, who also views it as a powerful link with the Six Nations. “One of the beliefs (of the Iroquois) is that all natural things are living and have a natural spirit and therefore stone is alive and worthy of communication,” Huff said. “It’s the same with Zen.”

Once he gets started, Huff trusts the stone to shape his art. He does not begin with an exact plan of what he will create. For the piece at the Zen Center, his only framework was a line from a speech once made by Oren Lyons, an Onondaga faithkeeper. “Who will speak for the birds and the animals?” Lyons asked, and Huff decided the new piece near the creek ought to both echo and answer the question.

He carved a woman in Zen meditation at the center of the limestone. “It didn’t seem right to put a human being on top,” Huff said. Instead, at the peak, he carved the hawk. At the base, he shaped a turtle, symbol of the earth. Then he set about interpreting other animals linked to the nine clans of the Onondaga, such as the snipe, the beaver and the deer.

Huff also carved everyday creatures whose presence in the stone was sometimes a surprise, even to him.

“I didn’t know the fish was going to be in there,” Huff said.

He needed to be done in time for a ceremonial unveiling last October. The last-minute challenge became moving the heavy sculpture from Huff’s studio to the Zen Center. A worried Chayat called Takashi Soga, an artist who once created an outdoor fountain near the creek. He connected Chayat with Jonathan Kirk, a sculptor who provided rigging to get the sculpture moved on short notice. Rob Benedict, a friend of Huff’s, added the cement work to anchor the sculpture to the ground.

Chayat, who has written about the arts for many years, does not see the sculpture as a solitary piece. The lake is sacred to the Iroquois, who speak of how their ancestors buried their weapons beneath a shoreline Tree of Peace. Since the Zen Center is midway between the lake and the Onondaga Nation, Chayat dreams of a time when three prominent Huff sculptures — near the center, at the lakefront and at Onondaga — might establish the beginning, the middle and the end of the Creekwalk.

As for Huff, despite the monumental scale of his new sculpture, he said he took the same approach he takes with any piece. “You work with the stone,” he said. “You don’t force yourself upon it.”

Through hard experience, we’ve learned that the same goes for the creek.